Color bars are often employed in digital rendering applications such as printing. Color bars are pressmarks that are used to ensure some minimal check on color integrity. A color bar is often provided in the form of a graphically displayed horizontal and/or vertical strip located at the top or bottom of design menus and are used to assign colors to elements and certain styles. A color bar may show the color chips associated with a current color set in a user palette and can also include various user input buttons or icons for changing colors.
In graphical user interface display environments, for example, color bars are typically implemented as a series of small squares that represent all the colors in a job. For the most part, color bars contain four boxes representing C (Cyan), M (Magenta), Y (Yellow) and K (Black) and/or variations thereof. C, M, Y and K constitute the basic colors involved in color rendering applications. If jobs contain spot colors in addition to CMYK, color bars can be modified to include these spot colors as well.
Traditionally, these spot color swatches are defined one job at a time. Products such as, for example, EFI One Flow, include “dynamic” color bars that can be defined once and used in a variety of jobs. The user may define a swatch to contain Spot1, Spot2, etc. and the system will define those swatches with spot colors found in the job. While this is a great advancement in productivity for offset, it falls short of the requirements for digital printing.
Accordingly a need exists for enhancing the functionality of color bars because the traditional swatch method does not handle a variable number of spot colors and also does not handle multiple color spaces in the input document.